2011-2012: Foi a pobreza que gerou a crise, não o inverso

2011-2012:  O EMPOBRECIMENTO GEROU A CRISE, NÃO O INVERSO. E ISSO ALTERA A AGENDA DO FUTURO.
.

Estender a jornada de trabalho, sem contrapartida salarial, é a contribuição que Portugal e Espanha oferecem ao mundo no apagar das luzes de 2011; uma alternativa neoliberal ao colapso do neoliberalismo. Antes de dar a isso o epíteto de uma excrescência conservadora talvez fosse mais justo creditar a Passos Coelho e a Mariano Rajoy o benefício da coerência. Nada mais fazem os dirigentes ibéricos do que radicalizar os  fatores que deram origem ao colapso mundial, assentado, entre outros pilares, em três décadas de arrocho sobre o rendimento do trabalho nas principais economias ricas, associado a mimos tributários que promoveram o fastígio dos endinheirados. Para clarear as coisas: não foi a crise que gerou o arrocho e a pobreza em desfile no planeta, mas sim o arrocho e a desigualdade neoliberal que conduziram ao desfecho explosivo, exacerbado agora por direitistas aplicados, que dobram a aposta no veneno. A ordem dos fatores altera o futuro: a crise não é apenas financeira; controlar as finanças desreguladas é um pedaço do caminho para controlar a redistribuição do excedente econômico, ferozmente concentrado nas últimas décadas na base do morde e assopra --arrocho de um lado; de outro, crédito e endividamento suicida de famílias e governos. (LEIA MAIS AQUI)

Austerity: the road to hell

Austerity: the Greek road to hell                                                                       

Irene Geller 

Eugénio de Andrade:Família do Poeta Espoliada?

Câmara do Porto já tomou posse do espólio de Eugénio de Andrade
Câmara ainda não revelou o que vai fazer com o espólio de Eugénio (Paulo Pimenta)

Um filme de Terror para a Saúde:Cancro é uma das doenças que perdem apoio total

Governo espera 200 milhões em taxas moderadoras em 2012

Isenção no cancro só com 60% de incapacidade

O Desgoverno Das Pequenas E Das Grandes Coisas

Braço-de-ferro no Governo sobre helicópteros

A Ameaça da Desordem:As Epidemias Como Fenómenos Sociais Totais

Morte na China relança preocupação sobre a gripe das aves

Mensaje del Primer Ministro de Portugal a los jóvenes: "¡emigren!"

Mensaje del Primer Ministro a los jóvenes: "¡emigren!"
Acosado por la crisis económica que no da señales de tregua y por dirigentes partidarios propios y ajenos, el conservador primer ministro de Portugal, Pedro Passos Coelho, envió un mensaje sin precedentes a sus conciudadanos: emigren.

Some Choices and Implications for a Popular Movement

VEM AÍ MAIS AUSTERIDADE: A OPRESSIVA TOLERÂNCIA ,ATÉ QUANDO?

Cavaco promulgou Orçamento do Estado para 2012

Eugénio contra poderosos

Eugénio de Andrade 

Josetxo Ezcurra

Campus de Corrupção de Uma Justiça Mal Equipada

Campus da Justiça 

Ministério cancela concursos 

INJUSTIÇA:DEPORTAÇÃO VIOLA DIREITOS FUNDAMENTAIS

Canadá expulsou mais de 700 portugueses em cinco anos

FUNDAMENTAL (IN)JUSTICE: THE DEPORTATION OF LONG ...

New World Disorder

United States as a Global Power: New World Disorder

A World on Fire

Even before that night, these parents likely knew something about the recklessness of the lives their children chose. For most of the kids, homelessness did not come from a horrid fall or a gradual decline. It was elective, a deliberate leap into the abyss. Recklessness as a point of pride. To see how far you could push it and still live. Or not live; many said they didn’t expect to see the age of 30. Wildness drew them to the rails, but in New Orleans I saw that more than wildness held them together.
A World on Fire

The Eurozone Fiasco

In the narrative of the economic and political elites that have long shaped it, the European project has put an end to the series of bloody wars that afflicted the continent up through the first half of the 20th century. In reality, of course, the process of European unification reflected and reinforced, from its beginnings, new kinds of divisions that continue to shape Europe’s social and economic landscape. In the early postwar period the gradual formation of the European Community helped to bring together the various European countries on the capitalist side of the Cold War divide, while in more recent decades the deepening economic integration of the continent, most dramatically exemplified by the adoption of a common currency by 17 of the European Union’s member states, has increased economic and class inequality by restructuring European societies along neoliberal lines. In addition to eroding the gains that the postwar “golden age” of capitalism brought to European working classes, this neoliberal model is now in grave crisis, as the contradictions underlying the eurozone project have begun to unravel.

The Eurozone Fiasco

Historias de inmigrantes

Historias de inmigrantes: 'Katzelmacher' 

EI-LOS QUE PARTEM

A avalanche dos novos portugueses no Brasil

Remembrance and Resistance in Fukushima

Christmas In The Radiation Zone

It’s the first thing you notice.  Electric orange, ripe and luscioushoshigaki hang from every bough.  As we drive through the country and over the glittering, snow-specked mountain range from Fukushima city to Soma on the northeast coast of Japan, we pass many persimmon trees dotting the landscape, all laden with fruit, ready for harvesting.  But this year, the persimmons of Fukushima prefecture will remain untouched.  Bounty only for microbial decomposers, they are a silent reminder of the slow-burning, far-reaching menace of a nuclear accident.

Since March 11, local people, long skilled in farming this verdant and fertile region, have added expert knowledge in radiation to their library of stored knowledge, and the persimmons are deemed unsafe; irradiated by the releases from the stricken nuclear plant at Fukushima-Daiichi, 25km south of here.  I am told the dried fruit, until now a local specialty, has particularly high levels of radioactive contamination.

As we drove through the glistening mountains I watched the readings of the omnipresent dosimeter dangling casually from the rearview mirror of Hiroyuki’s car first oscillate, then grow alarmingly.  Arriving in front of a children’s summer camp, and quietly handed a face-mask, an ominous beeping sound began as the readings peaked above 1 micro-sievert per hour, corroborated by a second dosimeter brought by Yuuki to check the calibration.  We pass an old local incinerator at work burning refuse and the numbers spike again.

Once confined to nuclear facilities and university laboratories, the people of Fukushima prefecture have become amateur radiologists, tracking radiation from place to place as wind and rain transport it around in random patterns across the local landscape.

Worried and angry because they have not received accurate information from the Japanese government about the radiation threat and because they want the government to evacuate more affected areas, the people of Fukushima have had to take matters in to their own hands.  The government’s own recently released Interim Report on the causes and lessons of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster highlights how poorly information was provided, “The following tendency was observed: transmission and public announcement of information on urgent matter(s) was delayed, press releases were withheld, and explanations were kept ambiguous. Whatever the reasons behind (this), such tendency was hardly appropriate, in view of communication in an emergency.”  According to the people of Fukushima, this tendency is continuing, especially now that Prime Minister Noda announced that the nuclear crisis has “been resolved”.

In Fukushima city the people are organizing to protect and monitor themselves.  In a slightly surreal experience, I am directed to one of the many Mecca’s to Japanese consumerism that are a feature of every town. But rather than shopping, inside the mall I am taken to the recently set-up Citizens Radioactivity Measuring...

CONTINUE READING

‘The Greek Cauldron’

‘The Greek Cauldron’
The outcome in both Athens and Rome was above all determined by outside pressure from the German and French governments, accompanied by relentless assault from the bond markets, which have priced up both countries’ debts to unsustainable levels. The installation of first Papademos and then Monti can thus be considered as bloodless coups, conceived and administered by the Eurozone leaders and the bankers, whose authorized representatives they are. Marx’s characterization of the 1830–48 July Monarchy in France—‘a joint stock company for the exploitation of the national wealth’, run by and for ‘the financial aristocracy’—has gained renewed relevance. [1] 
Soft coup
The magnitude of the May–June 2011 ‘movement of the squares’, and even more so that of the October general strike and ‘Day of No’, suggests the conditions of what Gramsci called an ‘organic crisis’, when ‘social classes become detached from their traditional political parties’. Such a crisis comes about when the masses ‘have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity’—‘the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces’. It now becomes a ‘crisis of authority’—‘the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State.’ [5] Confronted with this situation, the political system seeks to free itself from representative structures and the rules of parliamentary alternation of power. Gramsci spoke of ‘Bonapartism’ or ‘Caesarism’, which can be imposed ‘even without a Caesar, without any great, “heroic” and representative personality’.

U.S., Israel Discuss Triggers for Bombing Iran’s Nuclear Infrastructure

US, Israel Discuss Triggers for Bombing Iran

The Obama administration is trying to assure Israel privately that it would strike Iran militarily if Tehran’s nuclear program crosses certain “red lines”—while attempting to dissuade the Israelis from acting unilaterally.

PRIVATIZAÇÕES CUSTE O QUE CUSTAR

Portugal

Fears rise of a looming liquidity crisis

Liquidity crunch fears stalk markets

A protester outside the European Central Bank's headquarters in Frankfurt. Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

Banks deposited a record €412bn (£343bn) with the European Central Bank over Christmas. The cheap ECB loans taken up by 523 banks last week came through on Friday and it appears they prefer to park the money back with the ECB rather than lend it on to other banks, thus injecting more liquidity into the financial system.

There are also fresh signs of the eurozone crisis reverberating well beyond Europe with Japanese manufacturing production data overnight showing a worse slump than expected. The debt crisis and floods in Thailand were blamed.

PERDA DE CONSCIÊNCIA DO GOVERNO

Epilépticos terão de ir a juntas médicas para manterem isenção

À DEFESA

Militares protestam em frente ao Ministério da Defesa contra “regressão” nas carreiras

A 30 de Novembro em Lisboa, uma vigilia de militares em frente ao palacio de Belém, protestou contra o Orçamento do Estado (Pedro Cunha)

Occupy Rigged Elections: A Call for the Second American Revolution in 2012

A protester with the Occupy movement is led away by law enforcement after interrupting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at a campaign event for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. (Photo: Eric Thayer / The New York Times)

A great battle is coming. The 2012 elections are our chance to turn the tide back toward real democracy, but we must begin immediately. Only by organizing for a democratic revolution now can we break the hold of corporate criminals over our elections and take real power in 2012, legitimately and nonviolently.

Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement, millions of Americans are finally shaking off the depression and torpor of the past decade, heeding the mass-consciousness call to reclaim power from corporatist forces that have hijacked our country, our planet, and our future. We may not all have taken to the streets yet, but we will. Or we'll contribute in other creative, personally liberating ways, pitching in with prison-break fervor to unblock the...

Read Article 

US STRATEGY

Síria

A YEAR OF REVOLUTION

---

A Year of Revolution

In a year of revolution, causes have been easier to identify than consequences.
In 1989, following the end of the Cold War, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote in The End of History? of the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism”, marking “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. In the decades since Fukuyama’s landmark essay, the very concept of revolution - at least in the context of the rich, Western world - had itself come to be seen as an almost anachronistic idea. While still idealized in some quarters - most notably in student houses where posters of El Che [Guevara] are proudly hoisted to the walls, in defiance of the no-blue-tack clauses of student lease agreements - revolution had attained a quaint, nostalgia-tinged hue. That is, until this year. In 2011, revolution has returned to the center of global geo-political discourse. People have taken to the streets en masse across the Arab world, as part of the Arab Spring popular revolutions. The revolutionary fervour has since spread to the capital cities of the rich world. From Spain’s indignados, to the riots in London, Athens and Rome, to the Occupy Wall St protests that have spread from New York to other major cities around the world, the Arab Spring is turning into a global Autumn of Discontent.
Viewed through Fukuyama’s lens, the Arab Spring could be interpreted as the natural progression of these once repressive regimes into modern, Western-style democracies. How then do we reconcile with such a theory, the emergence of the Occupy movement, which originated at the heart of the financial-corporate-political nexus on Wall St? Certainly those involved in these protests, while apparently reluctant to articulate a list of “demands”, do not appear content to be living at the apogee of the modern participative democratic society.
Continue Reading »

CHILE:We Wish You Merry Christmas!

A demonstrator dressed as Santa Claus is arrested by riot policemen during clashes with students protesting against the government to demand changes in the public state education system in Santiago. Chilean students have been protesting against what they say is the profiteering in the state education system.

GUERRA DE CLASSES

El auténtico objetivo de Draghi en la Eurozona

The Political Implications of the Eurozone Crisis

A Shared Fate

Paul Krugman recently wondered whether it was possible to be “both terrified and bored” by the Eurozone crisis. It is indeed terrifying: the EU—the most important political innovation since the invention of the democratic welfare state—might break apart, or worse. Some are predicting the return of large-scale political violence; protesters on the streets of Athens are already comparing Greece, 2011 to Dachau, 1933. But the crisis is also boring, in that a sad pattern has predictably been repeating itself: markets jitter; politicians declare a make-or-break moment; national leaders host an all-night summit; bleary-eyed, they declare the crisis’s final resolution; the market-confidence fairy makes a brief appearance; and then the cycle starts all over again.

By now most people have settled on one of two economic solutions: either let the European Central Bank act as lender of last resort and issue Eurobonds (everyone’s view, it seems, except the German government’s) or impose discipline so as to avoid inflation and a permanent Southern EuropeanMezzogiorno (the official German view).

In the economic debate, however, it is easy to lose sight of the political and, ultimately, moral stakes. While it’s true that much of the business of the EU is business—running a common market—European integration was always first and foremost a political project: its goals included enduring peace, the entrenchment of democracy in member states, and, most recently, moving toward “ever closer union.” The crisis may indeed require Europeans to get serious about political union, at least among the Eurozone countries. But political union will not work without some sense of democratic legitimacy, which the current proposal for tighter cooperation among national executives is unlikely to generate.

Monetary union always had a somewhat unclear relation to the EU’s wider political objectives. Having one currency certainly does not guarantee peace or democracy; think back to the breakup of Yugoslavia, for instance. In theory, monetary union was supposed to have soon been followed by political union. But European elites never explained what political union would be or how it would relate to Europeans’ expectations about democratic government.

What, then, do potential resolutions of the Euro crisis mean for the legitimacy of the EU as a whole? That depends on how one thinks the EU really works and what has made it acceptable to Europeans so far. If one holds, as many European politicians still do, that European integration has proceeded on condition that European nation-states remained “masters of the treaties” (a favorite phrase among German officials), then whatever legitimacy European integration has is derived from the fact that national, directly elected legislatures have voluntarily delegated extensive powers to supranational bodies. According to this view, oversight of the EU through national executives, as well as consensual decision-making by member states, are crucial for reconciling the functional requirements of European integration with popular expectations of legitimate government.

However, the current crisis is likely to stretch any conception of legitimacy based on state-by-state democratic approval. For one thing, executives are completely in the driver’s seat, and parliaments are effectively disempowered. As Kevin O’Rourke has observed, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s notion of “fiscal union” doesn’t mean coordination of fiscal policies, but—in Orwellian fashion—designates almost the opposite: “fiscal discipline,” oversight by the European Court, and automatic sanctions for violations. Such plans would heavily constrain national legislatures, and curtail a core democratic power: the right of a sovereign legislature to draw up its own budget. None other than the German Constitutional Court has already signaled that automatic fiscal policies might be incompatible with democracy.

Europeans might accept supranational democracy in theory, but cannot see it as part of their lives.